Many databases use a log, which is append-only data file. Real databases have more issues to deal with (concurrency control, reclaiming disk space so the log doesn’t grow forever and handling errors and partially written records). A log is an append-only sequence of records In order to efficiently find the…

Databases have always been integral part of computer systems. Some of the initial enterprise grade applications were basic CRUD(Create, Read, Update and Delete) applications which existed with databases. They were used to store data in an format in persistent manner which can be operated only with the application written on…

What comes to your mind when you think of the concept ‘pattern’? A simple google search throws the Wikipedia definition, “A pattern is a regularity in the world, in human-made design, or in abstract ideas. As such, the elements of a pattern repeat in a predictable manner”. The most important…

The traditional client-server model works fine for most of the use-cases, but it falls little short in use-cases where large number of files or files of large sizes need to be transferred. This shortcoming is inherent due to the fact that there’s single server (small number of servers) tries to…

OAuth (Open Authorization) is an open standard for access delegation, commonly used as a way for internet users to grant websites or applications access to their information on other websites but without giving them the passwords. This is the Wikipedia definition for OAuth. As usual it is not exactly useful…

You might have heard about the term web-hook somewhere in context of client-server communication, as they have become increasingly popular due to simplicity they provide compared to the alternatives. At first, the whole topic of web-hooks seems quite tricky to understand just because it flips the common notion of how…

What are the distributed systems? A system where two or more machines work coherently to get a task done. In these systems, nodes (the term used for infrastructure components in distributed systems lingo) communicate via network. The ideal distributed system is the system where these nodes and the network is 100% reliable. But real world…

How consistency guarantees can be considered during understanding trade-offs? Context and Background: In earlier days of computational systems (as people call it Web 1.0), most of the computation or data processing used to happen on single machine. As world progressed to Web 2.0 (rise of social media, video sharing etc.), doing those stuff…

In modern systems, vertical scalability has it’s limitations due to upper bound it can hit and have certain point of diminishing returns (ratio of value to cost) beyond which cost increases exponentially for every unit of value. Horizontal scalability has become go to method of scaling huge parallel workloads or…